Kansas state station (1948)
"Listeners say it is the most vivid, the most real, the most significant program on the air. Radio experts call it the finest piece of out-and-out radio production on the air today. In addition to its great audience popularity, it is a 'showman's show' if there ever was one."
—Tom Carskadon, Tower Radio, January 1935
The March of Time radio show created dramatic retellings or re-imaginings of true events, much in the way Depression-era photographers sometimes posed their subjects—a poor family, or their pointedly meager belongings, for example—but managed to convey some human truth nonetheless. William Stott offers a definition for a "human document": "A document, when human, is the opposite of the official kind; it is not objective but thoroughly personal. Far from being dispassionate, it may be 'a document that is shattering in its impact and infinitely moving.'"The radio show, more than the newsreel, was able to convey the human, the personal, although not usually using an objective means. One March 24, 1938 radio show describing the effects of bombing civilians in Spain offers a potent example. A fictional witness describes a bus driver blown from his seat by the bomb's impact, although his dismembered hands are still clutched to the wheel. In recovering casualties, a "witness" describes, workers pick up the injured first, then tag corpses and dismembered parts. There was so much blood they had to hose down the streets. The segment begins with a mother and child on their way home from shopping. The mother orders her wandering child closer, an actor playing her later recounts, but it was too late: "My Juanita just disappeared before my eyes. Even as it could dramatize the frailest human moment, The March of Time radio show also gave weight to the silliest, including Mussolini's eight-year-old son's demands to go to war; Mussolini holding a party for mothers who have born the most Italian babies; and Hitler's desire for a female American tap dancer. Yet even the silliest, least factual elements of March of Time may reveal more than at first glance. In the case of Mussolini's son, The March of Time may be implying that Italy in general is war-hungry, and Il Duce egotistical in his taste for conquest; rewarding mothers for having many babies is also a way to build a future army; and Hitler's failure to fulfill his crush with a wholesome American shows he is human and defeatable, not noble or god-like as he had claimed. Americans could conquer him in that regard, the clip suggests.
—Tom Carskadon, Tower Radio, January 1935
The March of Time radio show created dramatic retellings or re-imaginings of true events, much in the way Depression-era photographers sometimes posed their subjects—a poor family, or their pointedly meager belongings, for example—but managed to convey some human truth nonetheless. William Stott offers a definition for a "human document": "A document, when human, is the opposite of the official kind; it is not objective but thoroughly personal. Far from being dispassionate, it may be 'a document that is shattering in its impact and infinitely moving.'"The radio show, more than the newsreel, was able to convey the human, the personal, although not usually using an objective means. One March 24, 1938 radio show describing the effects of bombing civilians in Spain offers a potent example. A fictional witness describes a bus driver blown from his seat by the bomb's impact, although his dismembered hands are still clutched to the wheel. In recovering casualties, a "witness" describes, workers pick up the injured first, then tag corpses and dismembered parts. There was so much blood they had to hose down the streets. The segment begins with a mother and child on their way home from shopping. The mother orders her wandering child closer, an actor playing her later recounts, but it was too late: "My Juanita just disappeared before my eyes. Even as it could dramatize the frailest human moment, The March of Time radio show also gave weight to the silliest, including Mussolini's eight-year-old son's demands to go to war; Mussolini holding a party for mothers who have born the most Italian babies; and Hitler's desire for a female American tap dancer. Yet even the silliest, least factual elements of March of Time may reveal more than at first glance. In the case of Mussolini's son, The March of Time may be implying that Italy in general is war-hungry, and Il Duce egotistical in his taste for conquest; rewarding mothers for having many babies is also a way to build a future army; and Hitler's failure to fulfill his crush with a wholesome American shows he is human and defeatable, not noble or god-like as he had claimed. Americans could conquer him in that regard, the clip suggests.